Tammi Lavette - I Don't Want Nobody Else

"I Don't Want Nobody Else" is one of the best songs that I have ever been involved with. But it had a long and sad story behind it. The original version was produced by The Nightcrawlers with Mary Kiani, way back in 1992, which I heard when I first got to work with them for Island Records. I adored the song but hated the chorus, so I got permission to rewrite the chorus in 1993. I recorded it for Mercury Records with Dee Jacobee, but it sadly never came out. Pete Tong then heard it and fell in love with it. He almost did something with it once Mercury dropped Dee Jacobee, but that never happened either. So it then became one of the first ever songs I recorded with Tammi Lavette, way back in 1995, when she was a teenager. But that never came out either. We then cut it on a mixed boy and girl group called Impact, managed by my cousin Daniel Glatman. They were to be signed to Mushroom Records until Korda Marshall left the company and the project got dropped. So finally, for the fifth time the song was recorded, we did it with Detroit legend Pat Lewis sometime around 1998. Finally the song got released on one of the "Best Of Motorcity" twenty volumes put out by Hot Records, in Miami. But I love Tammi's version. My fabulous Tammi performed at the Blackpool Mecca Reunion in 1998 and wowed everyone. We filmed her there singing "You Tore Apart My Broken Heart" and the video of that song captures it for posterity. Although Tammi was so very young when I first discovered her, I have watched her blossom into the most fabulous soul diva. Her version of "No Way Out" is my favourite track off my album "Yesterday And Tomorrow". Tammi also sang that huge 1970's Northern Soul classic recorded by Bettye Swann, "Kiss My Love Goodbye". As great a Philly song as you could ever wish to hear. It had such a dreamy, timeless, smooth orchestrated feel, that I always planned to cut it on someone one day. And also she tackled Barbara Acklin's timeless classic "Am I The Same Girl", all of which can be seen here on my YouTube channel. Tammi Lavette's real name was Tamla Dhani and when I first met her in 1993, we cut this song to try once again, to capture the sound we hit with it in 1991 with Frances Nero on a song called "Footsteps Following Me". We recorded it along with another song called "My Heart Keeps Saying No", and I initially named her Tamla Tyrrell, which, on reflection, sounds quite nice in itself. But in the end we settled on Tammi Lavette. I discovered her in time for the Blackpool Mecca Reunion in 1998, and we took her up there to perform on the Saturday night in the Highland Room in front of a thousand people. She was actually born in Africa, but from the age of four, she spent most of her life in New York and now lives in England. Tammi sang the theme song "Seven Days", for my massive documentary "The Strange World Of Northern Soul". The video for that can also be found on my YouTube channel. We also cut a song called "Too Much Too Late" with her, a song which was discovered by my mentor Chris Hill when he was head of Arista records. It was an obscure single in the early nineties by a group called Rufus Doors, a brother/sister act, but he left Arista before ever signing them. I snatched up the song and did it with Tammi. That video can also be seen on here too. We cut a whole album on Tammi, but it's never yet been released on CD although it is on iTunes.